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Stories
by Yan Ge
From multi-award-winning author Yan Ge, a shimmering, genre-bending English-language debut that announces the next phase in a major literary career.
In twenty years, Yan Ge has authored thirteen books written in Chinese, working across an impressive range of genres and subjects. Now, Yan Ge transposes her dynamic storytelling onto another linguistic landscape. The result is a collection humming with her trademark wit and style—and with the electricity of a seasoned artist flexing her virtuosity with a new medium.
A young woman bonds with an encampment of poets after a devastating earthquake. Against her better judgment, a college student begins to fall for an acquaintance who might be dead. And a Confucian disciple returns to the Master bearing a jar full of grisly remains. Weaving between reality and dreamy surreality, these nine stories wend toward elsewhere, a comforting, frustrating, just-out-of-reach place familiar to anyone who has ever experienced longing. Through it all Yan Ge's protagonists peer thoughtfully at their own feelings of displacement—physical or emotional, the result of travel, emigration, or exile. Brilliant and irresistibly readable, Elsewhere explores the utility (or not) of art in the face of lonesomeness, quotidian, and spectacular.
This highly anticipated collection is further proof that Yan Ge is a generational literary talent, to be watched closely for decades to come.
"Yan Ge explores human connections and disruptions in this ethereal collection… Here and elsewhere, Yan combines dry and subtle humor with her evocative lyrical style. These stories brim with intelligence." —Publishers Weekly
"A bold, confident book that delights in written language even as it probes it." —Kirkus Reviews
"Do you remember the feeling of not wanting anyone else to discover your favorite band? Of the music speaking to you as though it were some extraordinary secret only you could understand and decode? Yan Ge's Elsewhere, in all its spellbinding, strange, wondrous and captivating glory, is such a book: let me hold on to it a little while longer before you experience it too. A bewitching collection of stories that will leave you awestruck, shaken, and wanting to reach for it again and again." —Paul Yoon, author of Run Me to Earth
"Having already made a name for herself in Chinese, the prodigiously talented Yan Ge now reveals an equally compelling voice in English. The denizens of Elsewhere are misfits and dropouts, perpetually at odds with their surroundings in a world that refuses to accommodate them. A highly accomplished collection that is equal parts shimmering wit and startling emotional depth." —Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency
"I don't know anyone who writes like Yan Ge. In her distinctive story collection, Elsewhere, we meet characters from everywhere: the ancient world and the present day, the East and the West, the all-too-human and the larger-than-life. Throughout, we are confronted with questions simultaneously playful and profound, graced with dry wit and a blink-and-you-miss-it humour. Yan Ge writes with impressive facility across many registers, embracing a breadth of topics with both irreverence and pathos. Quick to read, but long to consider, I think this collection is extraordinary. " —Melissa Fu, author of Peach Blossom Spring
This information about Elsewhere was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of thirteen books in Chinese, including five novels. The first of her Chinese-language novels to be translated and released in the US, Strange Beasts of China, was one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Yan's English writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Irish Times, TLS, the Stinging Fly, and more. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia where she was the recipient of the UEA International Award for 2018–2019. She lives in Norwich with her husband and son.
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